20th century literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 16, Edna Davies

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Of all the forgotten writers I’ve researched, Edna Davies proved by far the most difficult. Even AustLit had nothing on her besides a list of a few works, but she intrigued me so I soldiered on. This post, like most of my recent Forgotten Writers posts, a revision, with a little bit of added information, of the one I posted there.

Edna Davies

So, for my AWW post I started at the end, where we get some facts. Her death was reported on 26 December 1952 in the Family Notices section of The Pioneer (from Yorketown, South Australia). It said she was 56 years old, which suggests she was born in 1896. The notice gives her name as Edna Irene, identifies her parents, and names her siblings as Daisy, Keith and Jack (deceased).

There are two other entries for her in the newspaper in December. On 12 December, a brief article announced that ‘Miss Edna Davies, “Pioneer” representative and correspondent, has been absent for some weeks because of ill health, and is at present in hospital, where she may have to spend some time yet’. They identify someone who will gather news, and add that “until Miss Davies’ return to Minlaton, advertisements, or payment of accounts, should be sent direct to the Pioneer Office”, which suggests she had an administrative role. They conclude this announcement, by saying that ‘The weekly feature “Comments on the News” (Written by Miss Davies) will, we regret, have to be temporarily suspended”, which confirms her writing contribution.

On 26 December, the same day the death notice appeared, they published a brief obituary. Here it is in full:

Press and Radio Correspondent Dies
Yorke Peninsula generally will feel the loss of Miss Edna Davies, of Minlaton who died in an Adelaide Hospital on Monday. Miss Davies, whose name is particularly familiar to readers of “The Pioneer,” has served many years as Southern and Central Yorke Peninsula’s chief correspondent for radio stations, provincial and metropolitan newspapers. People in many Peninsula towns will miss the friendly weekly phone calls she used to make in her search for news about the doings of local organisations and people. Her articles, as well as her Peninsula news items, have been of great value and interest, and we join her brother and sister and our readers in mourning her sudden demise.

So, it’s likely that she was born in Minlaton, central Yorke Peninsula, which is about 30 kms north of Yorketown, the home of her employer The Pioneer. Indeed, on 20 March 1926, a brief article appeared in The Pioneer, headed “Minlaton. Farewell to Miss Edna Davies”. The article describes an event that was held at the Minlaton Institute “to bid farewell to Miss Edna Davies and Mr. Jack Davies” (presumably the brother mentioned in the death notice.) They were leaving for London. (Indeed, according to Adelaide’s The Register, they left on 20 March). There were “eulogistic addresses” and “a useful cheque” was handed to Miss Davies. What does this tell us? Not a lot, but we can glean some information. She was around 30 years old, and seemingly not married. She was known in the community, at least enough for her departure to be reported on, albeit social news was more common at the time. It also tells us – from the headline – that it was she, not her brother, who was most known.  

Since writing my AWW post, I have done more research, and have discovered something about why she was known in the community. For example, Adelaide’s Observer (3 November 1923), writing on the Central Yorke’s Peninsula Agricultural Society’s annual show, observed that “the show committee provided the dinner … under the able management of Miss Edna Davies … Things worked smoothly in this department”. The article also praises the work of the Society’s secretary, Mr D.M.S. Davies, Edna’s father.

Anyhow, back to her chronology, three months after the report of her going to London, Moonta’s The People’s Weekly (12 June 1926) writes about the Minlaton Literary Society’s fourth annual musical and elocutionary competitions, advising that entries go to “secretary (Miss Edna Davies)”. This must have been a clerical error because, from the many newspaper reports under her by-line – and headed “Travel” or “Our London Letter” – it’s clear that she was in England by June 1926, then through 1927 and probably into early 1928. It’s possible that some of the articles dated later in 1928 were written back home.

Certainly, on 31 May 1929, there is a report in The Pioneer of the Minlaton Institute Literary Society’s seventh annual musical and elocutionary competitions and once again entries were to go to secretary Edna Davies. She probably was back on the job then. From this time, there are more articles, stories and columns – including her “Comments on the News” – by her South Australian papers. Together they build up a picture of who she was, and what she thought about life – local, national and international.

One that captured my attention was written from England, and published in The Pioneer on 6 January 1928. She starts by saying she hadn’t been doing much sightseeing so was “short of material” for her London Letter. So, she writes about some reading she’s doing about Australia, including a book by Mr Fraser. From what she says, I believe the book was Australia: The making of a nation (1911/12) by Scottish travel writer John Foster Fraser. Chapter 19 is tilted “A White Australia”. Fraser, a man of his times, understands the desire for a “white Australia”, but asks this:

What will Australian people say when the question is put to them, “As you are not developing this region [the great uninhabited north], what right have you to prohibit other people from developing it? It was not your land in the first instance. You obtained it by conquest that was peaceful. What can you do to resist conquest by force of arms? Who are you to say to the world, Let other peoples crowd together and be hungry owing to congestion of population, live cramped and struggling lives, but we, although doing practically nothing to develop our own resources, do not want anybody else to come in and develop the resources of a part of the world not given to us but given to the human race?'”

Davies is taken with this question and asks, “Have we all studied the pros and cons of the question carefully, so that should it be wanted, we can without hesitation give a carefully thought out decision after viewing the question from all sides. Looking back through history we see that no nation has ever come into, or held its own, without fighting for it, so why should we be an exception”. Her thinking – and Foster’s thinking – is not our thinking, but that she took the issue up and was published tells us something about her and the times. Neither of course consider that “little” line of Foster’s that “It was not your land in the first instance”.

Another randomly chosen example of her thinking comes from 20 June 1952, when she writes in her column “Comments on the News”:

READING about a press conference Mr. Menzies had recently in London this thought struck me — “What much wider outlook British pressmen seem to have than do their colleagues in Australia.”
And that’s a bad thing for Australia. Because if pressmen haven’t a wide outlook how can the public, who depend on them for news of the outside world, be expected to have one.

She slates it to the “old problem” of Australia’s geographic isolation, suggesting that “we are so isolated from other places that it it [sic] hard to realise that their welfare and their doings are important to us”.

AustLit lists 5 stories by her, and AWW lists 12 short stories in Stories from online archives (11 from the 1930s and 1 from the 1940s), but these are just a few of many short stories by her that were published in South Australian newspapers, and The Bulletin. I shared one of The Bulletin stories in my AWW post. Titled “Scrub”, it’s perfect “Bulletin-fare”, with its story of a woman who cannot get over a childhood nightmarish experience in the bush, and an intriguing take on lost-child-in-the-bush tradition in Australian culture.

Edna Davies turned out to be another example of an independent woman who seems to have made a career for herself in journalism and writing.

Sources

Edna Davies, “Scrub“, The Bulletin, Vol. 56 No. 2906 (23 Oct 1935)

All other sources are linked in the article.

Teffi, The examination (#Review, #1925 Club)

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Mostly for the Year Clubs, I read an Australian short story, usually from one of my anthologies. However, for 1925, I couldn’t find anything in my anthologies, so turned to other newspaper-based sources, including Trove, but I mainly found romances or works that were difficult to access. And then, out of the blue, I found something rather intriguing, a story titled “The examination”. It was written by a Russian woman named Teffi, translated into English by J.A. Brimstone, and published in The Australian Worker, an Australian Workers’ Union newspaper, on 25 November 1925. I don’t know when it was originally written, nor have I been able to found out who J.A. Brimstone was.

Who is Teffi?

The Australian Worker ascribes the story to N. Teffi. This nomenclature is interesting. My research suggests that Teffi, not N. Teffi, was the pen name of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya (1872-1952). Wikipedia gives her pen name as Teffi, but its article on her is titled Nadezhda Teffi. Curiously, the article’s history page includes a comment from a Wikipedian, dated 11 June 2014, that “Her pen name is only Teffi, not Nadezhda Teffi”. This Wikipedian “moved” the article (Wikipedia-speak for changing titles) to “Teffi”, but it was later moved back to “Nadezhda Teffi”. Seems to me it should be under “Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya” or “Teffi”. But, let’s not get bogged down. There’s probably more I don’t know about how she used her name over time.

The more interesting thing is who she was. Wikipedia provides what looks like a fair introduction to her life, so I won’t repeat all that here. Essentially, it says she was a Russian humorist writer who could be both serious and satirical, but whose gift for humour was “considered anomalous for a woman of her time”. However, she proved them wrong, “skyrocketing to fame throughout Russia with her satirical writings, so much so that she had candies and perfume named after her”.

Literary scholar Maria Bloshteyn, writing in the LA Review of Books in 2016, would agree. She starts her piece by describing Teffi as “once a Russian literary superstar”, and says that “Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya claimed that she took the comic-sounding and intentionally androgynous nom de plume for good luck”. Bloshteyn writes:

She began to publish in her early 30s and tried her hand in various genres, but it was her short stories, with their keen and hilarious observations of contemporary society, that were read by everyone from washerwomen to students to top government officials. They won her literary success on a scale unprecedented in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

My short story, however, was written post-Revolution, given we are talking 1925. But, I’m jumping ahead. Tsar Nicholas II was a big fan, Bloshteyn says, as was Vladimir Lenin “with whom she worked in 1905 at the short-lived New Life [Novaia Zhizn’] newspaper”. She left Russia in 1919, during the “Red Terror” when things started to turn sour. Her popularity continued in the émigré world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, her books were read again and “celebrated as recovered gems of Russian humor”.

This potted history sounds very positive, but Bloshteyn explains that there was also darkness in her life, including the death of her loved father when she was young, difficult relationships with siblings, a failed marriage, mental health problems, and more. Also, “she became a victim of her immensely successful but severely confining brand”, meaning editors and readers “only wanted the Teffi they knew” and, worse, “they perceived all of her stories as funny, even when they were clearly tragic”. How frustrating that would be, eh?

She was inspired by – and has been likened to – Chekhov. Bloshteyn says:

Her appreciation of the absurd, of the comic minutiae of life, helps set off the darker or more transcendent aspects of our existence, but her main focus, in the tradition of the great 19th-century Russian writers, was always human nature itself: what makes us tick and why.

I’ll leave her biography here, but if you are interested, start at Wikipedia, and go from there.

“The examination”

“The examination” tells the story of a young girl, Manichka Kooksina, who is sitting for her end-of-year exams which will decide whether she moves on to the next grade. Important things ride on passing them, including staying with her friend Liza who has already passed and getting the new bike her aunt promised her if she passed. However, instead of knuckling down to study she fritters her time, trying on a new dress, reading, and finally filling her notebooks with a prayer “Lord, Help”, believing that if she writes it hundreds or thousands of times she will pass. Needless to say, she does not do well.

The story is beautifully told from her perspective, with much humour for the reader as she flounders her way through preparation and the exam itself. She feels persecuted, an animal being tortured, and resorts to the absurd solution of writing lines, while her nervous peers have at least tried. I wondered why this particular story of hers was chosen by The Australian Worker. Was it the only one available to them in English? Did the examination theme feel universally relevant? According to Bloshteyn, Teffi said that “even the funniest of her stories were small tragedies given a humorous spin”. This is certainly a “small tragedy” for the – hmm, foolish, procrastinating, but believable – Manichka.

Bloshteyn’s essay is primarily a review of two books that had been recently published, Tolstoy, Rasputin, others, and me: The Best of Teffi and Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea. The former includes sketches and some of her “best loved short stories”. GoodReads says of it that “in the 1920s and 30s, she wrote some of her finest stories in exile in Paris … In this selection of her best autobiographical stories, she covers a wide range of subjects, from family life to revolution and emigration, writers and writing”. I don’t know whether “The examination” is one of them, but Bloshteyn writes, of the child-themed stories she mentions, that all “show children in the process of getting to know the world around them and finding the means to cope with it”. Manichka, although showing some resourcefulness, has a way to go.

I was thrilled to find this little treasure in Trove, and will try to read more Teffi. Has anyone else read her?

* Read for the 1925 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

N. Teffi
“The examination” [Accessed: 21 October 2025]
in The Australian Worker, 25 November 1925

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 15, Tarella Daskein

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I first came across Tarella Daskein back in 2021 when Bill (The Australian Legend) wrote a post about her as the result of her coming up in discussions and reading about Katharine Susannah Prichard. She then slipped my mind until a couple of months ago when I was searching around for a subject for my Australian Women Writers post that month. This post, like most of my recent Forgotten Writers posts, s a minor revision of the one I posted there.

Tarella Daskein

As with many of the lesser-known writers we research for this blog, Tarella Daskein (1877-1945) was somewhat challenging to pin down. It’s not that she wasn’t known. Indeed, Wikipedia and AustLit both have entries for her. However, there were conflicting details of her life. For example, both Wikipedia and AustLit had her death date as 1934, which was curious because Adelaide’s The Advertiser reported on her visiting that city in June 1935. How could that be? Further, The Advertiser also had her husband as Mr. T.S. Daskein while Wikipedia and other newspaper articles had him as Mr. T.M. Daskein. Compounding all this was her use of multiple names, including some confusion over her maiden name. The above-mentioned Advertiser, for example, reported it as Quinn. AustLit, however, resolved this by noting at the end of its entry that her name had been incorrectly spelled as ‘Quinn’ in Miller and Macartney’s Australian Literature: A Bibliography (1956). The death date issue was clarified by, strangely, Wikipedia’s article on her father, Edward Quin, which gave her death as 1945 and cited a newspaper notice as evidence. And a death notice for her husband confirms him as T.M. not T.S.

So, with all that resolved, who was this Tarella Daskein? Tarella Ruth Quin was born in Wilcannia, second daughter to pastoralist and one-time member of the New South Wales Legislature, Edwin Quin, in 1877. She is best known as a writer of children’s stories, but also wrote three adult novels – A desert rose (1912), Kerno (1914) and Paying guests (1917) – and many short stories which were published in contemporary newspapers and magazines. AustLit provides a good outline of her origins. She was one of eight children. Her father owned a dairy farm called ‘The Leasowes’, near Victoria’s Fern Tree Gully, and a sheep station called ‘Tarella’, after which she was named, in far western New South Wales near Wilcannia. ‘Ella’, as she was known, was educated in Adelaide, but spent most of her life on stations. She married Thomas Mickle Daskein, part proprietor of a station in far northwest NSW.

Cover for Tarella Quin Gum Tree Brownie

AustLit says that her first writing comprised short sketches of station life, which were published under the pseudonym “James Adare” in the Pastoral Review. At the editor’s suggestion, she also wrote some stories for children, which she sent to Ethel Turner, hoping to have them published in Sydney newspapers. However, Turner apparently recommended they be published as books. Her first book, Gum Tree Brownie, was published in 1910, with illustrations by Ida Rentoul whom Ella’s younger sister, Hazel, knew at school. This began a long partnership between the two, with Ida Rentoul Outhwaite illustrating many of her books for children. Wilde et al say she was “one of Australia’s most successful writers of fairy-stories for children” and that “humour, irony, a fluent, dramatic style and fantasy reminiscent of Lewis Carroll enliven her stories”.

Bill, as mentioned above, came across her, initially in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s autobiography, Child of the hurricane. Apparently, Prichard was governess for a year at Tarella Station in 1905, by which time Tarella, who was six years older than KSP, was already a published author. Prichard, says Bill, is “pretty dismissive” of Quin’s writing.

However, not all were. Several contemporary reviewers praised her adult novels, often singling out Kerno: A stone for special mention. On 10 April 1915, Adelaide’s Observer wrote:

Kerno, although similar in some respects, is nevertheless distinctly different from A Desert Rose. The latter is a novel – the former is a study – a keen analysis of human feelings and desires. One cannot well peruse the book without thinking deeply, and wondering what one would have done in circumstances like those in which the leading actors found themselves placed. Young people and those having a preference for light ephemeral literature may be inclined to consider the story rather tame; but all who have a true appreciation for human nature, and endeavour to probe into its many and varied qualities, will find in it compelling and absorbing interest.

Those who praise Kerno mostly praise it for its “real” characters and deep understanding of human nature. Indeed, the Observer says that it “richly deserves to rank among the best truly Australian novels”. Daskein was also praised for her understanding of and ability to convey life in the bush and, as the Observer says, for her “descriptive writing which … captivates the reader”.

Notwithstanding all this, Quin mostly wrote for children, with The Australian Women’s Weekly claiming, after the publication of Chimney Town in 1936, that

She has published more ambitious volumes, but her tales for children have a unique charm that makes one feel that this is her real metier.

Quin’s publishing career lasted from around 1907 to the mid-1930s, so it was no flash in the pan. AustLit lists over 20 works by her, but this may not be all. Regardless, she was well-known to readers of her time, and, according to Adelaide’s The Rouseabout, had some presence in literary circles, including being “a foundation member of the Melbourne centre of the P.E.N. Club and a constant attendant at its meetings”. She died on 22 October 1945, at a private hospital in Melbourne. The fact that I found little mention of this beyond The Rouseabout’s short article suggests that in the last decade of her life – after the death of her husband in 1937 – she faded from view.

The piece, “The camel”, which I chose for AWW, was published in The Bulletin’s Christmas issue in 1935. It shows a writer a writer who knows the outback, knows how to entertain her audience, and, who firmly belongs to the bush tradition. Life is tough, but our woman protagonist is resourceful.

Sources

Bill Holloway, “Tarella Down a Rabbit Hole“, The Australian Legend (blog), 16 December 2021 [Accessed: 9 November 2025]
The Rouseabout, “In Town and Out“, The Herald, 12 November 1945 [Accessed: 16 August 2025]
Tarella Quin, AustLit [Accessed: 16 August 2025]
Tarella Quin, Wikipedia [Accessed: 16 August 2025]
William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, The Oxford companion to Australian literature. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2nd, edition, 1994

Olga Tokarczuk, House of day, house of night (#BookReview)

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About 30 pages into Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, House of day, house of night, I turned to Mr Gums and said, I have no idea what I am reading, which is unusual for me. I certainly don’t pretend to understand everything I read, but I can usually sense a book’s direction. However, something about this one was throwing me, so …

I had a quick look at Wikipedia, and found this “synopsis”:

Although nominally a novel, House of Day, House of Night is rather a patchwork of loosely connected disparate stories, sketches, and essays about life past and present in … a Polish village in the Sudetes near the Polish-Czech border. While some have labeled the novel Tokarczuk’s most “difficult” piece, at least for those unfamiliar with Central European history, it was her first book to be published in English. [Accessed: 1 October 2025]

That made me feel better! I am more than comfortable with “loosely connected disparate stories” but am only generally-versed in Central European history. So, I decided to relax and go with the flow. From that point on, I started to enjoy my reading more, but it was slow going, because the “disparate stories” demand attention. It’s not a book you whizz through for story, but one you savour for thoughts and ideas, and for the connections you find along the way.

Tokarczuk calls it, in fact, a “constellation novel”, which I understand builds on thinking by the German critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). According to academic Louis Klee, who has written on “the constellational novel”, “these novels are recognizable by the presence of a first-person narrator committed to drawing affinities and making connections among disparate things”. They can be non-linear and incorporate various forms of writing from essayistic to lyrical to fragmentary, and encourage readers to find their own connections (like finding patterns in a constellation).

This well encapsulates House of day, house of night. It comprises numerous individually titled chapters (or sections or parts), some just a few paragraphs long, and others several pages. At first it felt disjointed, but it wasn’t long before an underlying structure started to reveal itself, one held together by a first-person narrator, a woman who had come to live in a small Polish village with her partner R – just like Tokarczuk and her husband did – three years before the novel opens. She tells of life in the village, and particularly of the relationship she develops with her neighbour, a somewhat mysterious old woman named Marta, who embodies a wisdom that she sometimes shares but other times must be gleaned from what she doesn’t say.

Interspersed with our narrator’s story, are other stories – some real, some magical, some past, some present – about the region and people in it. There’s a gender-fluid monk named Paschalis who is writing the life of the female saint Kummernis. There’s the unnamed couple who think they have it all, until each is visited by the same lover, a female for “he” and a male for “she”. There’s a religious community called the Cutlers who make knives and believe that “the soul is a knife stabbed into the body, which forces it to undergo the incessant pain that we call life”. There’s the wonderfully named Ergo Sum who had tasted human flesh in frozen Siberia, where he’d been deported in 1943, and believes he is turning into a werewolf. And so on. Some of these stories continue, for several chapters, woven around our narrator’s story, while others stand alone. Some are about people who think they have life worked out, while in other stories, the people don’t have a clue.

There’s more though, because scattered through the stories are ruminations on disparate things like dahlias, nails, comets and grass allergies. And threading through it all are various motifs, usually providing segues between chapters, encouraging us to see links and to ponder their meaning for us. These motifs include dreams, names, time, death, borders, mushrooms (potentially deadly), and knives. The more you read, the more connections you see between them and the stories. Many are philosophically-based, but are not hard to understand. In other words, the challenge is not in understanding, but in how we, individually, process the links we see. You might have already noticed some in my examples above, such as the idea of identity. Even the mysterious Marta, who disappears every winter, is unsettling. Who is she really?

“people are woefully similar”

This is the sort of book you would expect of a Nobel prizewinner. The writing is simple but expressive, and is accompanied by a rich, dark, and often ironic humour. We have border guards who don’t want to deal with a dead body so they quietly shove it to the other side of the border. And Leo the clairvoyant who says “Thank God people have the capacity for disbelief — it is a truly bountiful gift from God”. That made me splutter.

Underpinning all this – the thing that gives the book its heft – is a quiet but somewhat resigned wisdom. It interrogates some big questions – our willingness (or not) to see what is happening in front of us, our relationship to place, how we comprehend time, and who we are. These are explored through universal binaries, not only the night-and-day contained in the title, but life and death, change and stasis, ripening and decay. How do we live with – and balance – these parts of ourselves, of life?

But, House of day, house of night is also set in a particular place and time, southwest Poland, just post World War 2. This area, explains the Translator in her note, was part of the German Reich until 1945, when the Allies agreed to move Poland’s borders west. Many Poles left their old lands of the east (now part of the USSR), and resettled in this once German area in the west, occupying homes left by the evacuated Germans. This specific history is also found in the book, with Polish families hopefully, greedily, digging up German treasures, for example, and Germans sadly returning to see their old places.

House of day, house of night offers no answers, but it sure asks a lot of questions – about how, or whether, we can move forward into more humane, and hence more fulfilling lives.

This brings me to the ending. I won’t spoil it – it’s impossible in a story like this anyhow – but we close, appropriately, on the idea of constellations and finding patterns, and a hope that it is possible to find a pattern that explains it all. It is deliciously cheeky. And, on that note, I will end.

Olga Tokarczuk,
House of day, house of night
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Melbourne: Text publishing, 2025 (Orig. pub. 1998; Eng trans. 2002)
298pp.
ISBN: 9781923058675

Review copy courtesy Text Publishing

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1925 in fiction

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Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This week, it is 1925, and it runs from today, 20 to 26 October. As for the last 8 clubs, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

The 1920s were wild years, at least in the Western World. The First World War was over, and neither the Depression nor Second World War were on the horizon. It was a time of excess for many, of the flappers, of

A brief 1925 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1925:

  • Martin Boyd (as Martin Mills): Love gods
  • Dale Collins, The haven: A chronicle
  • Erle Cox, Out of the silence
  • Zora Cross, The lute-girl of Rainyvale : A story of love, mystery, and adventure in North Queensland
  • Carlton Dawe, Love: the conqueror
  • Carlton Dawe, The way of a maid
  • C.J. de Garis, The victories of failure
  • W. M. Fleming, Where eagles build
  • Nat Gould, Riding to orders
  • Jack McLaren, Spear-eye
  • Henry Handel Richardson, The way home (the second book in the The Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy)
  • M. L. Skinner, Black swans: Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno
  • E. V. Timms, The hills of hate
  • Ethel Turner, The ungardeners
  • E. L. Grant Watson,  Daimon
  • Arthur Wright, The boy from Bullarah

EV Timms had a long career. Indeed, he also appeared in my 1952 Year Club list. Zora Cross has reappeared in recent decades due to renewed interest in Australia woman writers. Both Bill and I have written about M.L. (Mollie) Skinner, a Western Australian writer who came to the attention of D.H. Lawrence. And then of course there are those writers – Martin Boyd, Henry Handel Richardson and Ethel Turner – who have never “disappeared” from discussions about Australia’s literary heritage.

While my focus here is fiction, it’s worth noting that many of Australia’s still recognised poets published this year, including Mary Gilmore, Henry Lawson, Dorothea Mackellar, Furnley Maurice and John Shaw Neilson.

The only well-recognised novelist I could find who was born this year was Thea Astley.

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. Because 1925 is a century ago, I had already started researching the year for the little Monday Musings Century ago subseries I started in 2022. So far, I have written just one post on 1925. It focused on two literary societies which were active at the time, the Australian Literature Society and Australian Institute of the Arts and Literature, so I won’t repeat that here.

I found a few interesting tidbits to share, including, in a couple of newspapers, a brief report of a talk given to Melbourne’s Legacy Club by local bookseller, C. H. Peters, manager for Robertson and Mullens. He reported that the English publisher, John Murray the Fourth, said

that the Australian consumption of fiction was enormous, compared with the English market, and that, making allowances for differences in population, the Australian read five novels to every one read by the Englishman. 

Some of the other items of interest I found were …

On a cult classic?

One of the surprising – to me – finds during my Trove search was the book Out of the silence by Erle Cox. It was, says The Argus (9 October) and the Sydney Morning Herald (28 November), first published in serial form around 1919, but there were many requests for it to be available in book form, which happened in 1925. The story concerns the discovery of a gigantic, buried sphere, which contains the accumulated knowledge of an ancient civilisation. The Argus’ reviewer says that the sphere’s aim “was to exemplify the perfection attained in a long past era and to assist the human race of the time of discovery towards similar perfection”, with the finder being helped in this goal by the “dazzling Earani”, a survivor of that civilisation.

The reviews at the time were positive. The Argus says that “the story is carried on with much ability”, while The Age (17 October) describes it as “brilliantly conceived and charmingly written … original and weird, maybe a little far-fetched”. Edward A. Vidler writes for the Sydney Morning Herald that “Mr. Cox is to be congratulated on a story of rare interest, which holds the attention from beginning to end”.

It has been republished more than once since 1925, including in other countries. For example, in 1976, it was republished in a series called “Classics of Science Fiction” in 1976, by Hyperion Press, and in 2014 an ePub version was published “with an Historical Afterword by Ron Miller”, who featured it in his “The Conquest of Space Book Series.” The promo for this edition describes it as “the classic lost race novel” in which a pair of amateur archaeologists “inadvertantly revive Earani, the survivor of an ancient race of superbeings”. But this is not all. It was also adapted for radio, and turned into a comic strip. You can read all this on Erle Cox’s Wikipedia page.

On reviewing

I enjoy seeing how reviewers of a different time went about their business. Some reviews in this era – the 1920s – tell the whole story of the novel, and do little else. Others, though, try to grapple with the book, finding positives as well as negatives, and sometimes discussing the reason for their criticisms.

Reviews for Dale Collins’s island adventure The haven are a good example. It seems that Collins had decided to have the main character – the male protagonist – tell his story. The reviewer in The Age (31 October) didn’t feel it worked, writing that Collins

repeats the experiment of blending psychology and sensation which he caried out so successfully in ‘Ordeal.’ It is a very clever and original story, but the reader who wants sensation will find there is too much psychology in it; and the reader who is interested in psychological studies will discover that the author has handicapped himself by making the central figure tell the story. As a result the psychology becomes monotonous …

The Argus (6 November) on the other hand was positive about the technique of Mark telling his own story:

Mr Collins has skilfully worked out the effect of the situation on each one of his characters, but especially on that of Mark, who reveals himself through a diary of their life on the island … The author has set himself a very difficult task in the carrying out of which he has been remarkably successful.

The reviewer in The Age (25 July) – the same one? – was disappointed in Zora Cross’s The lute-girl of Rainyvale, seemingly because of its supernatural subject matter concerning Chinese vases and curses, after the quality of her previous novel Daughters of the Seven Mile, but ended on:

The story has some vivid descriptive writing, which serves to emphasise that Zora Cross’s real gifts are wasted on fiction of this character.

Mollie Skinner’s Black swans was reviewed twice in the same column in The Age (12 September) with slightly different assessments. The first writes that it is “a very readable story founded on historical events in the convict days of Western Australia” and goes on to say that she had collaborated with D. H. Lawrence on The boy in the bush but that “her unaided work is preferable”. The review concludes that Skinner had “drawn her picture strongly and produced a good novel”.

Later in the same column, the reviewer (presumably a different one?) references Skinner’s work with Lawrence and then says of this new book that the story begins in Western Australia’s Crown colony days of 1849. Skinner “sends her childish heroine and hero on adventures amongst blacks and Malays, in company with an escaped convict” then “takes them to England for the social and love interest”. The reviewer concludes that

Miss Skinner writes well, with a special anxiety to set down striking phrases and epigrams. To quote a common, phrase, she is more interesting than convincing. 

Hmm … there’s a sense between the lines here that the story doesn’t hang together, but that Skinner, like Cross, has some writing skills.

As for Henry Handel Richardson, although her novel came out in mid-1925, I found only a couple of brief references to it. Martin Mills (Martin Boyd), on the other hand, fared better with some quite detailed discussions, including in the West Australian (4 July). The reviewer explored it within the context of being part of a rising interest in the “religious novel” and ended with:

Love Gods, with its old story of the unending conflict between the Pagan deities and the restraining influences of Christianity, is a novel of unusual insight, and most uncommon power of literary expression.

There’s more but I’ve probably tired us all out by now! I will post again on this year.

Sources

(Besides those linked in the post)

  • 1925 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
  • Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992

Previous Monday Musings for the “years”: 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1952, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1925 Club – and if so how?

Paul Laurence Dunbar, The scapegoat (#Review)

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Paul Laurence Dunbar’s short story “The scapegoat” is the fourth in the anthology Great short stories by African-American writers, which my American friend Carolyn sent me. Compared with the previous author, Gertrude H. Dorsey Browne, Dunbar is much better known.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Dunbar c. 1890, from The African-American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The biographical note at the end of the anthology provides good background, and Wikipedia has a detailed article on him. Dunbar (1872-1906) was, says Wikipedia, “an American poet, novelist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries”, and “became the first African-American poet to earn national distinction and acceptance”. In fact, it is through his poetry, which is frequently anthologised, that I recognised him when he popped up in the book. He was born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been slaves. Indeed, his father had escaped slavery before the Civil War ended, and fought with the Union Army.

Dunbar, says Wikipedia, wrote his first poem when he was six, and gave his first public recital at nine. Both sources say he was the only African-American in his high school. He was apparently well-accepted, being elected president of the school’s literary society, as well as being the editor of the school newspaper and a debate club member.

Wikipedia provides much detail about his work and publishing history, his health issues (particularly with tuberculosis which killed him), and his failed marriage to Alice Ruth Moore, whose story, “A carnival jangle” (my review), opened this anthology. He was a prolific writer, and was famous for his use of dialect, although he also wrote in standard English. Recognised in his own time, his influence and legacy continues. Maya Angelou titled her book I know why the caged bird sings, from a line in his poem “Sympathy“. But I will conclude with an assessment from his friend, the writer James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), who wrote in his 1922 anthology, The book of American Negro poetry:

He was the first to rise to a height from which he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was the first to see objectively its humor, its superstitions, its short-comings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds, its yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary form.

We see some of this in the short story chosen for this anthology.

“The scapegoat”

“The scapegoat” is the opening story in Dunbar’s 1904-published collection The heart of Happy Hollow. My anthology describes it as “Dunbar’s story of an ambitious and intelligent young man who sees no reason to sell himself short or accept defeat”. This is accurate, but only half the story.

It is told in two parts, the first before the protagonist Mr Robinson Asbury goes to prison, and the second after his release. The opening paragraph, after referencing the saying that the law is “a stern mistress”, chronicles young Asbury’s fast rise from a bootblack, through porter and messenger in a barber shop, to owning his own shop. The second and third paragraphs describe the story’s setting, the “Negro quarter” of “the growing town of Cadgers”. Here Asbury sets up his barber shop, and attracts customers with his ‘significant sign, “Equal Rights Barber Shop”‘, which our third person narrator says

was quite unnecessary because there was only one race about to patronise the place but it was a delicate sop to the peoples vanity and it served its purpose.

Whatever the reason, he was successful, and his shop became “a sort of club”, where the men of the community gathered to socialise and discuss the news. As a result Asbury soon comes to the notice of “party managers” who, seeing his potential to win them black votes, give him money, power and patronage. This Asbury accepts, and his power and status in the community grows. He then decides he’d like to join the bar, which, with the help of the white Judge Davis, he does.

And so the story continues. With success, he does not “leave the quarter” to “move uptown” as expected, though Judge Davis is prescient:

“Asbury,” he said, “you are–you are–well, you ought to be white, that’s all. When we find a black man like you we send him to State’ prison. If you were white, you’d go to the Senate.”

By now, Asbury’s success is arousing jealousy among his peers, particularly at a local coloured law firm. Two, Bingo and Latchett (great names eh?), are alarmed by Asbury’s fast rise to the top, but his putting out his shingle is “the last straw”. They plan to pull him down, and engage the services of another to lead an opposing faction in the community. However, with the continued help of the “party managers”, Asbury holds the day.

Now politics is messy, and allegiances switch. Along the way Bingo comes over to Asbury’s side. There’s an election, and Asbury’s side wins, but our narrator says:

the first cry of the defeated party was, as usual, “Fraud! Fraud!”

Was there fraud? Certainly there’s intimation of skulduggery, but without evidence it’s decided a “scapegoat” must be found – a big man – and so Asbury is deserted by the party “Machine”, and by his peers including Bingo, and charged. After the jury finds him guilty, Asbury seeks leave to make his statement, which Judge Davis allows:

He gave the ins and outs of some of the misdemeanours of which he stood accused showed who were the men behind the throne. And still, pale and transfixed Judge Davis waited for his own sentence.

It doesn’t come, because Asbury recognises Davis as “my friend”, but he exposes “every other man who had been concerned in his downfall”. He is sent to prison, for the shortest sentence the Judge can give, and is away for ten months, just long enough for him not to have been forgotten and, in fact, to be recognised as “the greatest and smartest man in Cadgers”. (This rehabilitation of Asbury in the eyes of the community while he is absent is just one of the many astute insights Dunbar makes about the way humans think and behave.) Part Two details Asbury’s revenge, but you can read it for yourself at the link below.

“The scapegoat” is a well-written, well-structured story set primarily within the black community, though the “party managers” who want the “black vote” are clearly white. Its main theme concerns political ambition and corruption, and racial oppression. It shows Asbury’s peers working to bring him down, putting their own ambition ahead of the good of the community, and overlays this with oppression by the string-pulling “Machine” uptown. I particularly liked the measured, neutral tone Dunbar employs which, together with his frequent insights into political behaviour and human nature, enables this story to read almost like a fable, a morality tale that says something in particular about this community, about the unfortunate behaviour of people who should support each other, but also something universal about politics and oppression.

It’s unemotional, clever, true – and, unfortunately, still relevant.

Paul Laurence Dunbar
“The scapegoat” (first published in The heart of Happy Hollow, 1904)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 45-56
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online (you can find the whole collection at this site)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 14, Gertrude Mack

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Gertrude Mack is the third of the Mack literary sisters, and by far the least known, though at the time she was well-recognised, with her activities and thoughts frequently reported in the newspapers. Her “disappearance” from view is most likely because, unlike her sisters, all her writing was for newspapers and magazines. She did not have one published book to her name. It makes a big difference to a writer’s longevity in the literary world.

As with many of my Forgotten Writers posts, I researched Gertrude Mack for the Australian Women Writers’ blog. This post is a minor revision of the one I posted there. So, who was she …

Gertrude Mack

Gertrude Mack (?-1937) was an Australian journalist and short story writer. The youngest of thirteen children – who included five daughters – Mack was born in Morpeth, New South Wales, to Irish-born parents, Jemima (nee James) Mack and the Rev’d Hans Mack. As a child, she lived in various parts of Sydney including Windsor, Balmain and Redfern, and was educated at Sydney Girls’ High School. Two of her older sisters also had literary careers, Louise Mack (see my posts) and Amy Mack (whom I featured last week). These sisters have been documented in Dale Spender’s Writing a new world: Two centuries of Australian women writers (1988) and by their niece Nancy Phelan in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but neither Spender nor Phelan mention Gertrude. According AustLit, a diary of Mack’s is included in Phelan’s papers at the State Library of New South Wales. Curious.

This dearth of formal biographical information meant relying heavily, for this post, on Trove, where articles written by Mack abound. They tell of a curious and adventurous woman who was able to report firsthand on those challenging 1920s and 30s in Europe and the Americas. For example, in 1924, four years after the Mexican Revolution, she decided to go to Mexico City, something her American friends thought “a wild whim”. She writes for The Sydney Morning Herald (22 November 1924), that “according to American newspapers, it did seem a risk, but I knew their way of making any Mexican news appear hectic”. In the end, it does prove difficult, and she fails on her first attempt. She admits that she was not prepared for the poverty she sees in Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, and “was not yet accustomed to the unshaven Mexican”, but she later wrote admiring pieces on the country.

Mack spent eight years in London from around 1929 to 1937, and returned at least once for a few weeks in 1933. It was a difficult time in Europe, and The Sun (18 June 1933) reports that she had found “the same sense of strain in all the European countries, and this has been intensified more recently by the war menace, which seems to be very real.” I have not been able to find an image of her, but during this visit, sister Louise described her in “Louise Mack’s Diary” in the Australian Women’s Weekly (17 June 1933):

Tall, very slight and svelte, in a smart black frock of her own making, her hair marcelled, her big, grey eyes looking big-ger than ever under the glasses she had taken to lately. Elegant? Yes, certainly.

An interesting little fact which came up in a couple of the newspaper reports of this 1933 visit was that on her voyage she, and two other “matrons” had been in charge of 48 children, who had been selected for the Fairbridge Farm School to be taught various branches of farming. Sydney’s The Sun (June 18) explained that “the children, whose ages ranged from eight to twelve years, included both boys and girls, and were chosen by the selection committee of the Child Immigration Society, which body exercises the greatest care in choosing only suitable potential citizens for Australia, says Miss Mack”. If you haven’t heard about Fairbridge, check out Wikipedia. Miss Mack might have had faith in it, but the whole scheme was marred by dishonesty, and worse, child abuse.

Gertrude returned again to Australia in 1937. There was much interest in her return, with newspapers reporting on her thoughts from the moment she first touched the continent in Western Australia. The West Australian (3 March 1937) wrote that she had passed through Fremantle in the “Orama”, and quoted her as saying Australian writers were doing well in London. “Henry Handel Richardson was acclaimed by many critics as the finest writer of the day”; and Helen Simpson (my first Forgotten Writer) “had taken up broadcasting work in addition to her writing”. She said Nina Murdoch had had success with Tyrolean June and Christina Stead with Seven poor men of Sydney. The paper observed, tellingly, that “undoubtedly Australian writers were getting more recognition in London than in their own country”.

It also quoted Mack as saying she believed England was interested in stories about Australia, but that their interest depended “entirely on the topic of the story.” Unfortunately Australian writers “usually presented the drab side of the life of the country and laid too much stress on the droughts and the drawbacks” and “the frequent descriptions of struggles against drought and the hardships of Australian life gave readers a wrong impression of the country”. Consequently, readers “did not realise that the country had a normal life, with a bright social side, and the mass in England seldom knew that there was very fertile land in Australia”. According to Mack, “German people knew more about Australia and were more interested than the people of any other country”.

Adelaide’s News (6 March 1937) took up the issue of how Australia is viewed, but with a slightly different tack, writing:

“It would be difficult,” said Miss Mack, “to make the average uneducated English man or woman believe that there is, in Australia, such a thing as culture. English people would be surprised if they could have a glimpse of real country life on a big station.
The only way to overcome this wrong idea.” she said, “is by our literature, which has not yet developed fully.”

Although she was talking about staying in Australia for just 6 months, it appears that Gertrude Mack was seriously ill when she returned in 1937. She visited her brother C. A. Mack, of Mosman, but died in a private hospital in Darlinghurst on Wednesday 31 March and was buried at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium on the Friday.

A few days later “an appreciation” written by “W.B.”  appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald (6 April). W.B. It’s a moving tribute:

To those of us who had the happiness and the privilege of an intimate association with Gertrude Mack over a long period, abroad and in Australia, her death has meant a very poignant personal loss and sorrow. Her happy outlook on life, her faculty for perceiving the humorous side of things, and her sensitive reactions to atmosphere, made her a delightful companion, and she made friends among every class of people, whether they were foreigners or people of her own race. She had an unusual flair for getting at the heart of the interesting aspects of life and affairs, and this, added to her other gifts, enabled her to write such charming and interesting sketches, stories, and interviews. Her short stories and sketches were invariably the outcome of personal contacts. She could paint engaging pictures of people and places, and make them real to her readers. She also possessed outstanding musical ability, and might have won distinction as a pianist had she elected to take up music as a profession, for she had a fine critical perception and a rare appreciation of the true values in music.

She also translated stories from Russian, collaborating with Serge Ivanov to publish in English a volume of N. A. Baikov’s tales for children. Gertrude Mack was a fascinating woman, and would be a worthy subject for a biography – either on her own, or as part of a larger biography on the Mack sisters.

Sources

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 13, Amy Mack

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In the first decades of the 20th century, a family of sisters made some splash on Australia’s literary scene. I have already written about the eldest of them – Louise Mack – but there were also Amy (this post’s subject) and Gertrude, all of whom appeared in newspapers of the time as writers of interest. They were three of the thirteen children of their Irish-born parents, Rev. Hans Hamilton and his wife Jemima Mack. As with many of my Forgotten Writers articles, I researched Amy Mack for the Australian Women Writers’ blog, where we have several posts devoted to her.

Amy Mack

Amy Eleanor Mack (1876-1939) was a writer, journalist, and editor. She was six years younger than the more famous Louise, and, says Phelan in the Australian dictionary of biography, was “less temperamental … and lived more sedately”, which is not to say she lived a boring life.

Mack began work as a journalist soon after leaving school, and from 1907 to 1914 was editor of the ‘Women’s Page’ of the Sydney Morning Herald. She married zoologist Launcelot Harrison, in 1908, and in 1914, they went to England where he did postgraduate work at Cambridge, before serving in Mesopotamia as advisory entomologist to the British Expeditionary Force. While he was away, Mack worked in London as publicity officer for the ministries of munitions and food.

The couple returned to Sydney after the war, with Launce becoming professor of zoology at the University of Sydney, and Amy continuing her literary career among other roles and activities. They did not have children. According to Phelan, after her husband died she continued to publish occasional articles, but her impulse to write faded as her health declined. She died of arteriosclerosis in 1939.

Works

Amy Eleanor Mack’s subject was nature, and she wrote about it in newspapers and books, for adults and children. Australian ecologist, Manu Saunders, writes on her blog that:

Australia has a wonderful heritage of nature writers, many working before nature writing was ‘a thing’. The national collection of Australian children’s books about native wildlife is inspiring. Even more inspiring, many of Australia’s best nature stories were written in the early-mid 19th century, and mostly by women.

And one of those women, she continues, was Amy Eleanor Mack. (I have written before on one of our early colonial nature writers, the pioneering Louisa Atkinson.)

Book cover for Bushland stories

Mack’s first publications were two collections of essays, A bush calendar (1909) and Bush days (1911), which were compiled from articles she’d written for the Sydney Morning Herald. She also wrote two popular children’s books, Bushland stories (1910) and Scribbling Sue, and other stories (1915). Wikipedia lists 14 books, many of which were first published in newspapers, but all of which have nature-related titles, like The Fantail’s house (1928) and The gum leaf that flew: And other stories of the Australian bushland (1928).

Her books were well-reviewed in the newspapers of the time. Her first, A bush calendar, was described by Sydney’s The Farmer and Settler (26 November 1909), as charming, “a sympathetic review of bird life and plant life in the Australian bush during the four seasons of the year”. But what is interesting is what they say next:

It is the kind of book that ought to be on every girl’s bookshelf, and every thoughtful and intelligent boy’s also, being not only an exceedingly pleasant thing to look at and to read, but one calculated to induce in many a desire to get to know more of nature in some of her sweetest phases.

I’m intrigued by the gender differentiation – “every” girl, but only “every thoughtful and intelligent boy”. These sorts of insights into other times make researching Trove such a joy. Anyhow, the review also suggests that it would be “a delightful remembrancer for Australians abroad”. A year later, on 26 November 1910, Sydney’s The World’s News, reviewed Mack’s children’s book, Bushland stories, calling it an improvement on A bush calendar. It comprises a “collection of fables, allegories, fairy tales, or whatever one chooses to call them” which, the News says, has “created a folklore for young Australians”. In it, Mack personifies nature, with birds, beasts and fish all acting and speaking “like rational beings”. Each story has a moral but there is none of the “preachiness, which many youthful readers shy at”.

Reviews of later books continue in a smilier vein. In 1922, on 6 December, Lismore’s Northern Star writes about Wilderness, which, it says,”tells in a most interesting way of the fascinations of a piece of land which once had been a garden, planted with fruit trees and roses, but which has been neglected until the bush reclaimed it for its own”. This is the book that Saunders writes about in her blog in 2017. The book had been originally published in three parts in the Sydney Morning Herald. Saunders explains that it

tells the story of an unnamed patch of wild vegetation in Sydney (Mack never names the city, but given the original publisher and the wildlife she describes, it seems pretty obvious). Mack describes the plot so vividly and intimately that you imagine yourself there. You can visualise Nature reclaiming this plot of land, left untended after the keen gardener who owned it passed away.

Saunders then describes its content, including examples of the nature Mack describes, as well as her attitude to it and her observations. Saunders was surprised but “weirdly” comforted to find conservation messages that are still relevant today embedded within the book.

Legacy

Australian feminist Dale Spender, in her book Writing a new world, says a little about Amy Mack, though she spends more time on Louise. However, she makes a point about the Mack sisters and their peers, Lilian and Ethel Turner:

Lilian and Ethel Turner, Louise and Amy Mack were part of a small group of spirited literary pioneers who at very early ages adopted public profiles in relation to their work. When they moved into the rough and tumble world of journalism – when they entered competitions, won prizes, and published best-selling novels before they were barely out of their teens – they broke with some of the long-established literary conventions of female modesty and anonymity. They sought reputations and in doing so they show how far women had become full members of the literary profession: they also helped to pave the way for the equally youthful and exuberant Miles Franklin whose highly acclaimed novel, My Brilliant Career (1901), was published when the author was only twenty-one.

Ever political, Spender argues that had it “been brothers (and ‘mates’)” who created the sort “colourful and creative community” these sisters did, and achieved their level of literary success, we would have heard of them. Books would have been written about ‘their “literary mateship” and they would have been awarded a place in the readily accessible literary archives’. But,

because these writers were women, and because they have been consigned to the less prestigious categories of journalism and children’s fiction (both a classification and a status with which I do not agree) they, and their efforts, and their relationships – to rephrase Ethel Turner – go unsung.

Amy Mack is less well-known now than her sister Louise, and certainly less well-known than Ethel Turner, but in her time she was much loved. However, even then, she didn’t always get her due, as a reader wrote to The Sydney Morning Herald on 16 April 1935:

With reference to the articles on Australian women writers in the Supplement, one is surprised at the omission of Amy Eleanor Mack, who surely wrote two of the finest books for children ever published in Australia. In “Bushland Stories” and “Scribbling Sue” the true spirit of our bushland has been preserved with a charm and sincerity all its own, and I think I am right in stating that, with the exception of Miss Ethel Turner’s “Seven Little Australians,” no books published in Australia for children had greater sales.

Four years later, announcing her death on 7 November 1939, The Sydney Morning Herald said that her work “had a mark of reality about them that found for her an increasing circle of readers”, but it was “A.T.” of North Sydney, who wrote to this same paper on 8 November, who captured her essence:

Her culture, wit, and broadmindedness, and her marvellous sense of humour made her a figure in the northern suburb in which she resided.

Sources

Nancy Phelan, ‘Mack, Amy Eleanor (1876–1939)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1986.
Manu Saunders, “The wilderness: Amy Eleanor Mack“, ecologyisnotadirtyword.com, 4 March 1917
Dale Spender, Writing a new world: Two centuries of Australian women writers, originally published by Pandora Press, 1988 (sourced in Kindle ed.)

Gertrude H. Dorsey (Browne), An equation (#Review)

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Gertrude H. Dorsey’s short story is the third in the anthology Great short stories by African-American writers, which my American friend Carolyn sent me. It presented an unexpected challenge.

Gertrude H. Dorsey (Browne)

The biographical note at the end of the anthology is one of the shortest provided by the editors. It goes:

Who was Gertrude H. Dorsey Browne? By the evidence of her published work between 1902 and 1907 in Colored American Magazine she was a clever writer of literary short fiction at the turn of the twentieth century; the little romance “An equation” is possibly her first published short story.

She does not appear in Wikipedia, and an internet search found very little, but it did find something, an article published in 2021 by two journalism students, Sarah Barney and Smelanda Jean-Baptiste. They write how an interest in Dorsey was sparked in a Newark reading group in 2017, when they met to discuss ‘a story, a witty romance titled “An Equation”’. Intrigued by the author’s apparent Newark connection, they decided to research her life. They discovered that she was born on 1 August, 1876/77, in Coshocton, Ohio, to Clement Dorsey and Martha Johnson Lucas, and that she died in April 1963 and was buried in an unmarked plot in Cedar Hill Cemetery.

Dorsey graduated from Coshocton High School in 1896, the only African-American student in a class of 11. She maintained honor roll throughout her years and was a member of the school’s Literary Society. While in high school, she had been a sales representative for the Black-owned Cleveland Gazette newspaper, and did this same work when she moved to Newark as a representative for the Colored American Magazine.

Further, the book club found that while Brown (as they spell her name) worked as a sales representative, she also wrote some stories for the magazine. Some was nonfiction but most was fiction, and her writing “often engaged with pertinent issues such as racism and Jim Crow through wry story plots”. They say her stories

transcend, but do not dismiss, class, race, and gender. They often speak to the hidden truths of what makes us human and the pride involved in shielding those commonalities. 

Not much else is known about her life, but the book club women recognised that “Brown had literary talent in a time when graduating from high school was a feat for women, especially Black women, and writing for a leading national magazine was an even greater accomplishment”.

“An equation”

“An equation” was, it seems, her first story. According to Barney and Jean-Baptiste, another story, titled “A case of Measure for Measure,” is about a group of white women who blacken their faces to attend a “blackface ball.” Afterwards, they discover that the paint won’t come off, forcing them to ride in the segregated car on the train, and thus “learn firsthand some hard lessons about racism and class”. 

“An equation” is not so overtly political – perhaps because it was her first – but, whatever the reason, it is a witty romance that slots into that idea of “the hidden truths of what makes us human”. The anthology’s editors say in their Introduction:

All of the stories in part or in whole are necessarily about the human condition, such as Gertrude H. Dorsey Browne’s “An equation”, in which the narrator declares that “the power of loving is not variable”.

It tells of a young 19-year-old woman, Grace, who obtains a job as an assistant to the Principal of her college and as a result meets 26-year-old school inspector, Raymond Turner, to whom she finds herself attracted. The story is told from her point-of-view and progresses through a series of mathematical jokes which start with her describing Turner as an “Unknown Quantity”. Unlike typical romance stories, this romance doesn’t really get off the ground before it seems to be over. In fact, it nearly doesn’t happen at all due to missed communications, hurt feelings and too much attention paid to mathematical theories and concepts like certainties and uncertainties. But, our lovers are brought together at the end and the story concludes with yet another mathematical joke.

Race is not an issue here, and class differences, while evident, are a background factor rather than a major player in the story. It does have interest, however, beyond being an enjoyable story. This relates to the fact that it was published in the Colored American Magazine, which was, according to an article I found, “a Black-owned, -published, and -operated magazine catering to a Black audience”. Tanya Clark, the article’s author, talks about CAM editor Hopkins’ pedagogical intentions for the magazine, which encompassed “challenging the status quo and elevating the race”. However, she also wanted “to provide African Americans with narratives that simply bring them gratification”. This is, I think, where Dorsey’s story comes in. It’s an entertaining and intelligently written story that could be about a romance between any young educated couple. That, of course, is a political point, but it’s subtly made by just being the story it is.

Clark also makes the point that under Hopkins, “CAM was a publishing forum for women writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction articles”. These women included “seasoned and budding writers, … race leaders who wanted to try their hand at creative writing, … and friends and subscription agents of the magazine” who included Gertrude Dorsey Browne. Clark says “their woman-centered stories honored sisterhood among Black women, showcased Black women’s intellectual capacities, and praised Black women’s desires to work, organize, and fulfill hopes for domesticity”.

“An equation” is one of these “women-centred stories”. The love interest (the “Unknown Quantity”), the romance’s trajectory calling into play questions of probability, and the resolution, draw on mathematical concepts which assume an intelligent, educated readership. It did feel a little clumsy in its exposition, due perhaps to the inexperience of the author, but it has much to offer as an example of African-American writing of the time, besides its being a clever story. I mean, talking of love in such mathematical terms. Who would have thought!

Sources

Tanya N. Clark, “Hagar Revisited: Afrofuturism, Pauline Hopkins, and Reclamation in the Colored American Magazine and Beyond” in CLA Journal, 65 (1): 141-162 (March 2022)

Sarah Barney and Smelanda Jean-Baptiste, “Uncovering a Literary Treasure: Local Book Club Re-discovers Newark’s Gertrude Dorsey Brown”, in The Reporting Project, 20 February 2021

Gertrude H. Dorsey (Browne)
“An equation” (first published in Colored American Magazine, August 1902)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 36-44
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online in the digital version: scroll to page 278

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 12, Catherine Gaskin

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

Of all my Forgotten Writers posts, this one is the most questionable because I’m not sure she is completely forgotten. For baby-boomer and I think some Gen X readers, Catherine Gaskin was a household name. Just ask Brona who reviewed her 1962 novel I know my love, and said in her post that she’d read her mother’s whole bookshelf of Gaskins. But, Gaskin has, I believe, now slipped from view and is worth a little post. Her big, breakout novel was her sixth, Sara Dane (see Wikipedia), which was published in 1954. It remained popular through the 1960s to 1980s, when it was adapted to a miniseries in 1982. So, who was this writer …

Catherine Gaskin

Catherine Gaskin (1929-2009) was, says Wikipedia, a romance novelist – but I seem to remember her books as being historical fiction so I’d say her genre was mostly historical romance. She also included mystery and crime in her stories, at times. The youngest of six children, she was born the same year as my mother, but in County Louth, Ireland. She was not there long, however, as when she was only three months old, her parents moved to Australia, settling in the Sydney beach suburb of Coogee. She wrote her first novel, This other Eden, when she was 15 and it was published by Collins two years later, while she was still a schoolgirl. It sold 50,000 copies, and she never returned to school.

After her second novel, With every year, was published, she moved to London with her mother and a sick sister, Moira (who also published two novels). Three best-sellers followed, Dust in sunlight (1950), All else is Folly (1951), and Daughter of the house (1952). Wikipedia lists 21 novels to her name. In his obituary, Stephens tells that as a child she had loved reading, and read such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene and Scott Fitzgerald. 

According to Wikipedia, she completed her best-known work, Sara Dane, on her 25th birthday in 1954, and it was published in 1955. It sold more than 2 million copies, was translated into a number of other languages, and was made, as I’ve said above, into a television mini-series in 1982. It is loosely based on the life of the Australian convict businesswoman Mary Reibey. Stephens writes that ‘a Herald critic described the novel as “most readable”‘ although the critic also suggested “that Gaskin’s understanding of history was not deep”. He says that “after Sara Dane, many of her books were overlooked by critics, although welcomed by readers”.

At least three of her novels – Sara Dane, I know my love, and The Tilsit inheritance – were adapted for radio, by Australia’s Grace Gibson Radio Productions, and many others besides Sara Dane, were translated into other languages.

Gaskin met the man who became her husband in London, and they married in 1955. He was a TV executive and 19 years her senior. They lived in various places together, including the USA, the Virgin Islands, and Ireland. However, she returned to Sydney at the end of her life, and died there in September 2009.

I was inspired to write this post by some research I did for the #1970 Year Club last year. Journalist Rita Grosvenor visited her in Ireland around the time of the publication of her novel, Fiona. Grosvenor writes that:

She is among the elite of the world’s women novelists, with such a faithful following of readers she can be sure that every time she produces a new book it will sell 50,000 copies in hard-cover – and that’s more than most authors sell with a handful of books. With paperback sales she often passes a million.

Grosvenor’s article was for the Australian Women’s Weekly, so there’s much about her living arrangements and house, but towards the end, she shares Gaskin’s thoughts about her writing. Despite her success, Gaskin is depressed every time she starts a book, fearing that “this time it is not going to work out, but somehow it does”. However, she says:

“I know I can never be a Graham Greene, but I always want to improve within my limitations. I’m a perfectionist.”

As Stephens writes, “she knew her limitations but didn’t like being regarded as a romantic writer”. She saw herself as “an entertainer and good craftswoman who married romance with history and studies of such subjects as trades and places”. 

According to Stephens, Gaskin retired after her last novel, The charmed circle, was published in 1988. She wanted to travel with her husband, without publishers’ deadlines. So, they did travel, apparently, until his death in 1999. She then moved to Mosman, in Sydney, and spent the rest of her life there. Stephens quoted her as saying, ”I am not an Australian by birth but I think like one”.

Have any of you heard of or read Catherine Gaskin?

Sources